


From Start To Finish

by Deanon



Category: Novus Arx
Genre: Breakups, F/M, Serious Injuries, does it count as infidelity if they don't get around to kissing for another DECADE, indirect pining, not graphically depicted though, relationship arcs from start to finish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-12
Updated: 2015-04-12
Packaged: 2018-03-22 14:19:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3732055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deanon/pseuds/Deanon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If the first time Meril saw Havi was also the first time she saw Tanum, things might have played out differently.</p>
<p>But then again, maybe not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From Start To Finish

**Author's Note:**

  * For [emifrets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/emifrets/gifts).



The first time she notices him isn’t the first time she meets him. She saw him when he hired her for the job and again when she came to get the details from him, but she doesn’t _notice_ him until she comes with the artifact.

“So,” she says, tossing the paper-wrapped package in the air and back down again and watching him _twitch_ every time she does it. She tosses it a little higher, just for fun. “That much money and effort for a _mirror_?”

“Yes – well, not quite, it’s – can you please _stop that?”_ He hisses. His cheeks are a little flushed with exasperation, and Meril hasn’t had this much fun outside of a job in _so_ long.

“Make me,” she teases, tossing the mirror up in the air again, nearly to the ceiling. She absolutely does not expect him to take a giant step into her personal space and snatch the mirror out of the air. It almost goes crashing to the ground as he fumbles it, and she chokes on sudden laughter.

“Nice,” she says.

“Be _quiet_ ,” he responds, stepping quickly back away from her. But he’s _almost_ smiling, she can feel it.

_So_ much fun.

“So what does it do?” Meril says, pushing some artifacts out of the way (and he cringes again, which makes her let a couple of them clatter a little, just because) so that she can hop up on the counter. “The mirror, I mean. And what horrible thing happens if it breaks?”

He’s watching her suspiciously, but nothing clatters to the floor (she’s better than _that_ ) and so after a second, he says, “Well.”  He takes a breath. “It’s – I mean, you can see, it’s an octagonal mirror, which means it’s inherently got some imbued magical properties for clarity, scrying, things like that, but _this_ one – “ he’s unwrapping the mirror as he speaks, getting more and more animated, “ _this_ one was crafted by sun elves, in the same process that you make glassteel with – “

As he goes on, his whole face lights up, and before she knows it she’s asking questions and watching as he casts a curse (an actual curse! right in front of her!) on this little steel marble, then lets her hold it in a gloved hand and pass it through the mirror, watches as the curling smoke of the curse suddenly dissipates into the glass of the mirror. She gasps appropriately, and he _beams_.

His hand brushes hers as he takes the marble back from her. He blushes _scarlet_.

So, so much fun.

* * *

 

Havi hires her three more times in the next two weeks. She accepts every job. Her go-between in the thieves’ guild starts to give her _looks_ when she drops another, slightly higher-paying job to do one for Havi, and she just says, “His are more interesting.” It’s not a lie, exactly.

Before now, there’d been no sign that the magical shop that Havi always had her come to was actually a _shop,_ but when she steps in this time, there is another person in there who is definitely _not_ Havi, looking around the shelves, digging through them, muttering in a low, cheerful voice to himself the entire time.

She makes a show of peering around the shelves for a minute, watching the guy. He doesn’t show any sign of leaving though, so, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, she steps up to the counter and calls, “Havi, you back there?” into the back room.

The guy in the other corner of the shop whirls around. Now that she can see him, they look a little similar; curly red hair, freckles, a little short. He smiles at her, huge and genuine, and says, “Wait, you’re Meril, right?”

“Yeah,” she says, slowly. “And you’re….?”

“Tanum!” He sounds so _excited_ about it. “I’m Havi’s, uh, business partner! Sorry, he’s really wrapped up in something, he sent me to meet you, but obviously I wanted to be sure it was _actually_ you or that’d be pretty awkward, right? Okay, so! Did you get it? Of course you did.”

Meril isn’t sure what she was expecting from Havi’s scattered mentions of “Tanum”, but it definitely wasn’t this. Before she’s even fully answered he’s pulling her into the back of the shop, which she’s never been before, and having her lay out the whole series of little opals on the table so that he can show her what each one does alone, and then in combination. She can hardly get a question in edgewise, and she can imagine, suddenly, just what he and Havi must be like around each other.

She’s at the shop nearly every day after that, job or not. Half the time it’s Havi and half the time it’s Tanum, and either way she ends up spending hours there, asking teasing questions, watching Havi get flustered and Tanum get excited, and it’s great. Havi shows her what every single artifact that she brings in does, shows her basic spells and never laughs at her questions about magic. Tanum asks her about her time in the thieves’ guild, asks to join while tripping over his own two feet, and doesn’t seem to mind too much when she laughs at him.

 They’re the best friends that she’s had in so long. She knows it’s never a good idea to get attached to customers, but she figures that she can afford to be young and reckless for just a little while longer.

She wonders what Havi would think of being thought of as “reckless.”

She wonders what Havi would think about a lot of things.

* * *

 

After a month, she walks into the shop and finds herself grinning at just _seeing_ Havi there. He’s leaning over the counter, doing nothing in particular – scribbling in some notebook, his eyebrows creased, his eyes squinted behind his glasses.

“Boom,” Meril says, smacking the packaged book down on the counter, right on top of Havi’s notes. He jumps a _mile_ in the air, and she cackles at him. “As requested.”

Havi gives her that shy smile that makes her stomach twist, and he says, so genuinely, “Thank you.”

He reaches for the book, and she slides it away from him without even looking at it. “How about you tell me about this one’s deep and terrifying powers over dinner?”

Something shatters in the back room. Havi doesn’t even flinch; he’s too busy staring at her as though this hadn’t even _occurred_ to him, after an entire month of flirting and accidental brushes and her sitting, every day, up on the counter that he’s currently leaning on.

“Oh,” Havi says, and the way he sounds so flattered and so _lost_ makes her forgive him for not immediately leaping at the chance for dinner with her. “Oh, yes, I. Yes. That would be.” He clears his throat. “Yes, absolutely. Uh, I should – “ He turns a quarter of the way around, to call, “Tanum, I’m going to, uh – did you _break_ something?”

“ _No!”_ Tanum’s voice sounds a little panicked, which doesn’t really inspire confidence. Havi and Meril share a glance. “No, uh, that’s fine, everything’s fine, I didn’t – well okay it wasn’t anything _important_ , just a cup, haha! Not even a magical one, it’s fine. Go, um,” his voice cracks, “go enjoy dinner!”

Havi and Meril share another, longer glance. “Come on,” Meril says, holding out a hand. “He’ll be fine. Take me out to dinner.”

And after casting one long, last look at the curtain dividing the front of the shop from the back, Havi takes her out to dinner.

* * *

 

Dating Havi isn’t immediately much different from being friends with Havi. She’s still at the shop every day, poking around the shelves, pulling down magical artifacts to toss them around (occasionally giving Havi minor heart attacks while doing so, which is still one of her favorite past times).

It _does_ seem like Havi is around more than Tanum, though, which doesn’t bother her at all. After a couple weeks, he starts inviting her into the back of the shop, shows her their storage rooms (they have _way_ more stuff than they can fit in the front, plus they keep the truly dangerous stuff away from whatever members of the public happen to wander in. Havi _looks_ at her when he says this, and she gives him her most innocent eyes.)

She’s back there with him, and his stream of explanation has paused for him to look something up in the crumbling-apart tome he has laid out on the workbench. Experience has taught her not to touch anything on the shelves, but _looking_ is fine – generally – and so she’s doing that, when something catches her eye.

It’s a tulip, looking fresh from a field, lying innocuously on the shelf. When she peers at it, though, it is covered in a thin layer of dust. A forever-fresh spell, maybe? Does such a thing exist?

She opens her mouth to ask Havi, but the words don’t quite make it out of her mouth. No matter how hard she looks, she can’t quite tell what color the tulip is. She can tell that the petals are crisp and fresh under the dust, but the color seems to shift every time her head moves; maybe it’s white, or yellow, maybe even pink, or a delicate shade of blue? She’s tilting her head, staring at it, and barely even registers Havi’s voice when he says, “Meril, wait, what are you – “

She hadn’t realized she was reaching for the tulip under she’s already touching it and it’s _scalding_ her fingers, a sharp lance of pain that runs up her whole hand. She gives a cry and jerks away, straight into Havi’s hold, gasping, “ _What_ the hell was – “

“Are you ok?” Havi’s looking at her hand, and then the tulip, as though he’d never seen it before. “Did you touch that?”

“Yeah, and got _burned_ for my trouble!” Meril feels sort of offended by the fact that she’d been burned by a _flower_. “What kind of weird spell – “

“But – it shouldn’t be under a spell,” Havi says, squinting at it. “Or at least we don’t know what kind, beyond obviously being freshly-picked forever.” He moves her to the side so he can look closer at it. “We didn’t think it was under anything else. It’s never….”

Havi reaches out to touch it, and Meril has time to get out “Hey, wait, you – “ before Havi has picked up the tulip, obviously perfectly unharmed. He blows off the dust, and the color of the tulip resolves to a shining, vibrant yellow.

They’re both silent for a second, Havi peering suspiciously at the tulip (which is sort of a hilarious image), Meril considering whether or not it would be stupid to place a magically-burned finger in her mouth to relieve some of the ache. She presses a little against it to see if that helps, and then hisses when it emphatically _doesn’t_.

“Oh!” Havi places the tulip back on the shelf and grabs her hand. “Yes, sorry! Sorry, I should have done this right away.” He picks up her hand (and turns delicately red), passes his other hand over it, and the pain immediately dissipates.

“ _Cool_ ,” Meril breathes.

“It’s not really,” Havi starts, turning even redder. He’s staring down at her with wide eyes, the tulip forgotten in his hand.

“ _So_ cool,” Meril murmurs, and uses her newly-healed hand to reach up and cup his cheek. When he doesn’t freak out beyond a slight widening of his eyes, she uses it to guide his face down, until she can stand on tip-toes and gently kiss him.

For a second, everything is sweet and good.

Then Havi hisses and _flinches_ away, almost flinging the tulip across the room. “ _Ow!_ ” He’s shaking his hand, staring at the tulip like it’s betrayed him. “What in hell’s name did Tanum _do_ to that thing?”

“Tanum?” Meril’s eyes snap from the tulip back to Havi, and watch in fascination as he does the same hand-wavy gesture to his own hand that he did to hers. “Did Tanum make it? Did he not tell you what he did to it?”

“Yes – well. Sort of.” Havi looks down at her, still looking faintly embarrassed and pleased. “See, he’s, um.” He shifts on his feet, looking away from her. “He’s got, well.”

* * *

 

“It’s a _condition_.” Tanum is drunk but not yet slurring his words, leaning across the table to look at her conspiratorially. Meril’s more than a couple drinks in too, and so she matches his posture, leaning forward so that they’re nearly nose-to-nose over the table. “It’s all very exciting. I mean, also super annoying and I break stuff _all the time_ – “

“That’s not the – er – condition, Tanum – “

“ _Yeah well_ – I break stuff all the time, but sometimes I also can do this really cool stuff. It’s like a whole grab bag of magic. It adds mystery to it!” Tanum doesn’t sound _that_ broken up about his condition. Not the way that Havi had sounded about it, when he’d haltingly told her about its existence in the back storage room before insisting that Tanum should be the one to tell her the rest. Tanum, after a couple drinks, is only more than happy to do just that.

“How’d you get it, though?” Meril asks. Havi had called it a curse, but then quickly corrected himself to _condition_. Tanum’d called it half a dozen different things, including “that one weird thing where my magic doesn’t work quite right,” but none of them had given her a whole lot of insight.

“Oh! Uhm, well,” Tanum says, and inexplicably drew back to cast an unfortunately obvious glance at Havi. “It’s just one of those things that – happened.”

“It just happened?” On a hunch, Meril directs this question at Havi.

Not meeting her eyes, Havi says, “Yes. Just – happened.”

It’s the first time he lies to her.

* * *

 

A month turns into two, turns into three, into four. She takes jobs that aren’t from Havi, because he can’t employ her constantly and she’s not suited for _every_ job that he needs done; not the ones that require extensive magical knowledge, for example.

She doesn’t spend _every_ day in his workshop, but it’s more than not. There are more kisses, more evenings of him telling her about magical artifacts, evenings of her talking about her more interesting heists to his (and often Tanum’s) rapt attention. He takes her out to dinner and buys her presents and is sweetly attentive and embarrassed.

He _never_ talks about himself.

It is driving her to the brink of insanity.

It’s an evening in Havi’s workshop, and she’s using his delicate tools to rework some of her lockpicks while he runs through experiments with a goblet that he’d had delivered earlier that day. They’re working in a comfortable silence. Havi’s measuring out portions of water, pouring them into the goblet, and then casting various spells on it.

He casts one, and it suddenly _flares_ with light, flooding the whole room for a moment before it slowly fades back down. Meril is left blinking fast, trying to regain her vision while already asking, “What the hell was that? Were you making it into a lantern? Because you might want to tone it down a little.”

“I tried to, uh,” Havi’s still blinking, “purify the water? That has _never_ happened before.”

“So, what, like, holy water?” Meril is already dropping her tools and moving over so that she can see more closely what Havi is working on.

“Yes, sort of,” Havi murmurs, clearly already distracted. “The spell shouldn’t have worked like that – that was _reflecting_ it, I think.”

“Where’d you learn to do something like that?” Meril is kicking her feet slightly, watching as Havi runs his finger along the rim of the goblet.

“Well, it’s a fairly common cleric’s spell.”

“Did you always want to be a cleric?” She notices that Havi isn’t looking at her at all.

He pours some water out of the goblet, runs his fingers through it. They glow faintly gold. “Not always. My… parents wanted it.”

“You sound pretty bitter about it.”

The goblet clangs slightly against the table when Havi knocks his hand into it. He’s pointedly not looking up at her now, staring down at the water that is swirling slightly in the bottom of the goblet. Her stomach suddenly hurts. “It was fine.”

She stares at him, meaning to do so until he looks up at her, but instead he suddenly pours out the rest of the water and starts to pack up the goblet. “Havi…” she says, slowly. “That doesn’t sound fine. At all.”

“It was _necessary_ ,” Havi says, low and intense, and drops the goblet on the table before turning and walking out of the workshop.

* * *

 

Meril apologizes for pushing.

It’s the only time they talk about Havi’s family.

* * *

 

“And so,” Havi says, winding down a long rant that Meril has only understood about half of, “if we activate it correctly, it will open just fine. And if we _don’t_ activate it correctly, it blows up everything within a ten foot radius of itself.”

That, at least, explains the canyon that they’re in, a couple miles outside of town. Meril had not, strictly, _had_ to follow them, but she’d walked into the shop just in time to have Havi walk past her mid-argument with Tanum, “You _cannot_ do that in the shop – “

“C’ _mon_ , it’ll be fine! It will _definitely_ be fine, and even if it’s not it’s not like it’s anything we haven’t gone through before _anyways_ so – “

“We are taking it out to the canyon, Tanum,” and obviously Meril _had_ to follow them after that.

Havi had been filling her in ever since them, but after all of that she mostly could simplify it to: there was a ring in the middle of this little box, which had been enchanted by an insanely jealous witch. She’d died, so grabbing this from her estate auction had been easy; it was getting it _open_ that was going to be hard, and possibly extremely destructive.

Tanum’s making another pitch for his plan for Havi to just let him try it, seriously, he’s _sure_ he can get it, when Meril says, “Why don’t you just let it blow up?”

Havi and Tanum _both_ look at her like she’s insane, which is an accomplishment. “What?” Havi asks eventually.

“Well, the box isn’t meant to destroy the ring, just whatever lowlife is trying to steal it,” Meril says. Tanum snorts. “So is the ring made of strong enough stuff to withstand the explosion? Because if it is then just blow up the box from a distance and take the ring from the rubble. Clean it off a little bit and it’ll be good as new.”

Tanum is almost _vibrating_. “That could _totally work_ ,” he says. “I mean, it’ll be really messy,” he doesn’t sound displeased about this at all, “but it could definitely work!”

“It, well,” Havi is looking hopelessly between Meril and Tanum, “it _probably_ wouldn’t destroy the ring.” He sets the box on the ground, eyeing it. “Alright, back up.”

Meril and Tanum scramble back in the same moment, glancing excitedly between each other. They hide behind a large rock, which Havi joined them behind before casting mage hand (“Aw, you’re not going to let me do it?” “ _No, Tanum_ ”) and using it to reach out and, ever-so-delicately, activate the lock.

The response is instantaneous and deafening. The box explodes outwards in a curl of magical fire and what sounds slightly like a woman’s scream arching up into a single wavering note before cutting off abruptly. It echoes off the walls of the canyon, making the whole aftermath creepy.

“So, uh,” Tanum breaks the silence that had fallen. They are all staring at the blackened piece of ground that had been the box holding the ring. “D’you think the ring survived?”

He and Havi move forward at the same time, but Havi gets there first, his fingers picking delicately through the rubble to dig out a blackened, smudged, but undeniably intact ring.

“ _Put it on_ ,” Tanum says urgently.

Havi shakes his head. “We don’t even know if it’s – “

“Fine okay _I’ll_ put it on,” Tanum says impatiently, and snatches it out of Havi’s hand to slip it onto his finger.

Tanum instantly turns into a drow, shrinking down a few inches and turning dark. His voice, when it comes out, is higher and panicked as he says, “What happened?”

“You’re,” Havi says, sounding choked. “Oh my god.” He bursts out laughing, and then, unexpectedly, turns and picks Meril up to spin her around. “Oh my god, I can’t believe that worked!”

Tanum is still frantically demanding, “What did I turn into!” when Havi kisses her.

She doesn’t realize until it is happening that it’s the first time Havi has initiated _anything_. He kisses her, but only if she starts it, and they haven’t gone much beyond kissing. But now he’s twirling her around and kissing her in elation over some ring, and Meril feels something in her heart flutter in a way that terrifies her a little.

She kisses him back, and notices, only distantly, that Tanum has gone quiet.

* * *

 

After that, Havi starts trusting her with more and more magical projects. He starts hiring her again, for more complicated heists. He still doesn’t kiss her much and the dates and presents taper off, but Meril’s happy, truly.

She’s not as flattered or as fascinated as she was at the beginning, but she is very much never _bored_.

So when she shows up at the shop and Havi takes one look at her standing in the doorway and says, “You have to _help me_ ,” her first thought is to be excited.

She’s more than halfway across the room and still smiling when she registers the way his eyes are red, with bags under them. His hands are clutching a book in his hands so tight that his knuckles have gone white, crinkling the pages underneath them. In the same moment as realizing this, she says, “What do you ne – what’s wrong? You look like shit.”

The silence between them stretches for so long that she almost, _almost_ apologizes, but Havi doesn’t look offended. He doesn’t look like he’s even fully registered the insult. He looks like he’s struggling to get words out. When she is finally starting to progress from concern to a sort of panicked worry, he says, “It’s Tanum.”

That doesn’t help. “Is he – “ Meril says, and then even she can’t think of how to finish that question.

“He’s alive,” Havi says, and it’s worrisome that he feels the need to lead with that statement. “He was – “ Havi buries his hands in his hair. “He was hurt. Badly hurt.”

It becomes so silent in this shop that she can hear someone walk by on the street outside. She is not used to engaging tact, but it hurts her, to see how badly Havi is clearly torn up over this. She wants to help but he’s given her no tools, no signs, to indicate how she _could_. At a loss, she reaches up and places a hand on her arm. He allows it.

“He – ” Havi continues haltingly, “A spell backfired. He was trying to cast – well, I don’t actually know, because he hasn’t woken up yet.” Havi’s voice cracks on the last part. “But whatever it was, it blew up in his face.”

“Is he,” Meril says slowly, searching for words, “okay?” She hasn’t heard her own voice shake so badly in so long.

“He’s – he’ll be fine,” Havi says. “He’s been sleeping since it happened. I got to him fast enough to put out the flames,” Havi looks on the verge of vomiting for a moment, “and heal the worst of it.”

“Okay,” Meril says, and she wants to be relieved except that Havi doesn’t look any better than he did when she walked in. Finally, she continues, “You said you needed my help.”

“Yes,” Havi says, “right,” and he stands up, looking like it takes physical effort. “Come with me.”

He strides into the back so quickly that she has to rush to catch up with him, nearly losing him when he climbs up a set of stairs that they have only been up a few times, the two times they have made it as far as Havi’s bedroom. He heads down the hall, past his room, and pokes his head into another room – Tanum’s, she assumes – but is out again before she catches up. “He’s still asleep,” Havi says, voice soft. “Through here.”

He opens one of two doors at the end of the short hallway. It leads into an office that is so full of books, scrolls, and even a few magical stones that it is difficult to get in the door. They’re piled in front of the window, making the whole room shadowy; she’s about to ask how Havi reads in here when he waves his hand and a small ball of light appears in the middle of the room.

The place looks like it used to be more organized but recently has experienced a complete upheaval. Stacks of books are knocked over, the entire desk is covered in scribbled-on pieces of paper, and the whole room smells of books and dust and faintly of smoke.

“A library?” Meril says, momentarily forgetting how upset they both are in favor of her customary curiosity. “Stuff you’re not willing to sell?”

Havi smiles, barely. “Maybe someday I’ll be able to sell it. If it eventually works.” He gestures her over to the desk, and starts laying out a series of notes that he’s taken. As he speaks to her, he reaches into the desk and pulls out even more. “You know that Tanum has a condition, a, a – “ he swallows hard, “a curse. He’s had it since childhood. It makes his magic behave strangely, in ways that we can’t seem to track. Or fix.”

He finishes laying out notes. “Tanum thinks that he can learn to work with it. He experiments with – his own magic, his own limits. Aids and focuses. That’s what his office is full of. But,” Havi sounds so close to the brink of tears that Meril steps into his personal space again. He doesn’t even seem to notice her, his head hung over the desk. “It’s not _working_ , and we both know it. He can’t consistently control it. That’s the nature of the curse. Nothing has worked. Nothing will _ever_ work.”

Meril has a sudden flash of insight. “So you’re trying to cure it.”

She looks around for the first time, looking at the titles of some of the books in the stack nearest to her elbow. The series of titles, _Rune of the Spellbreaking Equation, Dispel, Magical Self-Defense_ , answers her question, but Havi doesn’t.

He says, “Meril, if I hadn’t been home today,” and can’t get another word out.

She doesn’t know what to do, but that no longer seems quite as important as just doing _something_ , so she places a hand on his shoulder to try to pull him forward. He slowly, reluctantly, turns and presses his face into her hair, breathing intentionally slow and steady.

He says, finally, “I have to fix this.”

Meril looks around the room, filled so full of books that it is difficult to move. It’s obvious that years and years’ worth of work have gone into what this room represents. She has seen Havi enthusiastic, has seen him excited and even obsessed with magic, but she has never seen him _consumed_ like this.

Her second insight dawns slow and undeniable: she will never matter to him this much.

She doesn’t have time, though, to figure out how she feels about this. It’s been nearly nine months and he hadn’t even told her before now about what is _clearly_ his life’s work –

And the real reason behind that life’s work, his friend, _both_ of their friend, is lying unconscious in the next room. So she says, “Well, I don’t know what I can do, but I’ll do my best to help.”

When Havi says, into her hair, “ _Thank_ you,” she tries hard to convince herself that that is all she needs.

* * *

 

She can’t help him with Tanum’s curse.

It was a long shot to think that she could in the first place, and they both knew that. The people who Havi has asked for help from in the past are few and far between, but most of them were experienced magicians, people with a background in this kind of thing. People who stood some chance at telling Havi something that he didn’t know.

He was hoping that she’d be able to look at it from a new direction, but she gets caught in the same patterns of thinking that he does. She suggests, one day, that maybe Tanum _does_ have the right idea; at least he can apply his attempted solutions now, instead of just waiting for the day that they either break the curse, or it kills him.

Havi looks stricken, and then doesn’t speak to her for the rest of the afternoon.

She probably deserves it.

In the meantime, Tanum wakes up. He apologizes to Meril for worrying her when he sees her, but then tells her excitedly about the seeking spell that he’d been working on when the accident had happened. He hasn’t stopped working on it, and Havi looks a little sick whenever he talks about it.

The jobs from Havi stop coming. He spends a couple of weeks almost exclusively holed up in his office, and he generally turns down her help after her thoughtless comment. Tanum, apologetically, assures her that this _happens_ whenever he gets hurt by the curse, and that you just have to wait it out, seriously, he’ll come around soon enough!

He does eventually emerge, but it’s not the same. He’s not as interested with locating magical artifacts right now, he tells her, more with researching the ones that he has, finding out if they have any more hidden properties, like the tulip. She still spends time holed up in his workshop with him, still kisses him, but she’s frustrated now in a way that she hadn’t been before.

She wants him to let her in. She wants him to kiss her like he really, really means it. She wants him to come out with her and blow stuff up. She wants him to come with her on heists and adventures.

She knows, without asking, that this is not what he wants.

* * *

 

She shows up at the job in the early afternoon one day. It’s not early or late for her since she has never had a consistent schedule, but she’s not expected, either, so she creeps in the side door of the shop (it’s nearly hidden behind a pile of stuff, but she knows the lay of every inch of that shop by now) and sneaks in, aiming to startle Havi.

She hears, instead, the sound of Tanum excitedly saying, “Havi, c’mon, come over here, I’ve got something I need to show you!”

She creeps around a shelf, curious; she sees the same (more reluctant) impulse drive Havi out from behind the counter and next to Tanum. From this angle she can see both their faces, but a large pile of baskets is in the way of her seeing the rest of their bodies.

“Alright, so,” Tanum says, and there’s a wrinkling of paper. “I heard about a rumor of this, that it was just kind of being kept in this person’s house who collected magical artifacts without really knowing their worth.” Havi snorts. “Yeah, right? So I didn’t want to get our hopes up, because obviously that kind of person is gonna end up with mostly trash, but I figured this is probably worth a trip! So I slipped in there and I found it, with that seeking spell I finally got to work, uh, sort of! And _oh my god Havi you have to see this_.”

He pulls out – something, she still couldn’t see clearly, and Havi actually _gasps_. He leans forward into it, running a hand down it and saying, “Is that – “

“A pwf – piwaf – a drow cloak, yeah,” Tanum says, and then he’s throwing it around his shoulders, nearly knocking a few things off the counter in the process. “And obviously I had to make sure it was the real deal, and I’m _pretty sure_ that it is, Havi, look at this.” He draws up the hood, and it’s immediately obvious what this cloak does. Even knowing exactly where he is in the extremely cramped space, it becomes hard to focus on just the spot where Tanum is. Glancing over it makes her think that there’s a sort of blurry spot in front of the register that she _knows_ he’s in front of.

“Tanum,” Havi says, and he sounds excited and almost _reverent_. “That’s – “

“Incredible, right!” Tanum cast off the hood and became visible again, the cloak turning a dark blue when it was just around his shoulders. “I wore it and walked right out of there and nobody looked twice at me. Can you _imagine_ how useful this’ll be? It hardly even counts as breaking in anymore!” They dissolve into speech, so fast and sometimes over each other than Meril can’t follow most of what’s being said. It’s obvious, every time Havi and Tanum talk about these things, that Meril is not Havi’s equal in magic, that she never even stands a chance at it.

Meril draws in slow, steady breaths as she watches their faces. Havi smiles at Tanum, that same smile that she loves seeing, and Tanum just lights _up_.

She tells herself that she’d seen it before, that she’d _known_ , and she had, probably. She’s known Tanum’s kind as soon as she met him because she was cast from the same mold, and she’d known what keeps people like them around people like Havi, day after similar day. It –

_It’s love_ , she thinks, like yanking her wrists out of handcuffs, hard and painful and all at once. _Call it what it is; Tanum loves him_.

She’d known, she really had, but she’d seen the way that Havi looked at her, and she figured it wasn’t really any of her business how Tanum felt.

But she thought of their offices, and Havi’s face when she’d come in that morning after Tanum was hurt, and the smile on Havi’s face now and the way that Tanum couldn’t seem to look away, and she wondered if she’d known anything at all.

She slips back out the side door, closing it quietly behind her.

* * *

 

She comes back to the shop two days later, and comes in the front door.

Havi is learning against the front counter, scribbling in a notebook, and it is so _very much_ like the first time that she’d noticed him that she feels her heart break, just a little. Not as much as she’d expected, though.

Havi looks up and smiles at her, and it’s so similar and not the same at all.

She loves him, she thinks, with a kind of quiet resignation. She does; she loves his enthusiasm and his knowledge. She loves how he loves her curiosity and how he tried so hard at the beginning. She does love him.

“Meril,” he says, catching on to something, closing the notebook, “is everything alright?”

She thinks that he maybe even loves her.

There’s clattering coming from the back of the shop that means that Tanum is just behind that curtain, working on something, probably breakable. He might not have even heard her come in, but he’s almost certainly going to notice what happens next.

She wishes Tanum wasn’t going to be around for this, and a second later reconsiders. It’s probably for the best.

“Havi,” she says, and then takes a deep breath and braces herself to cut straight to the chase. “This isn’t working anymore.”

The flash of emotions on his face, confusion-relief-hurt, tells her enough.

He’ll be fine, and she’s glad. She loves him. He probably even loves – loved – her.

Just not enough.

She casts a glance at the curtain, at what lies beyond it.

Just not the _same_.


End file.
